Wednesday, January 11, 2012

Soldering Technique and Building and Testing a 5V Power Supply

After first day orientation and a "brief" description of the course, we were shown to the electronics lab room and given soldering kits and assorted electronic parts to practice soldering joints to an electronic wafer.



Once the instructors were comfortable with our understanding of soldering technique (filling the pad, proper use of flux, orientation and mechanical soundness), we moved on to practice parallel butt-joint soldering.



We made a ring of four butt-joints which had to be strong enough that it could not be broken with a moderate amount of manual force. Once we were finished, heat-shrink tubing was used to protect the fresh joints from the elements.



Our final task of the night was to combine the knowledge and techniques gathered from the two previous exercises in order to craft a customized 5V power supply to be used for powering our bread board projects for the rest of our course. A 120VAC-to-5VDC power supply was provided to us and we were tasked with stripping the original proprietary device link and soldering two metal pins in its place (using the aforementioned butt joint soldering technique).


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